Edward de Bono
Dr Edward de Bono:
“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong,
than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”
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Edward de Bono and I co-founded the School of Thinking (SOT) in New York in 1979. Since then Dr de Bono’s work in the teaching of thinking has become renowned worldwide.
My interest in his work began after I had returned from Vietnam ten years earlier in 1969. I was shown one of his first books by an RAAF Education Officer in the Officer’s Mess at Point Cook in Victoria.
We first met in 1972 when he visited Melbourne on his first lecture tour. He was a Professor of Investigative Medicine at Cambridge University. He told me that he had developed a syllabus for ‘teaching thinking as a skill’ and was trying to get it off the ground. I offered to help him and asked him to send me a copy.
Motivated by my experiences in the Vietnam war and inspired by Edward’s CoRT Thinking syllabus I became convinced that ‘teaching people to think for themselves’ was one of the most worthwhile things I could probably ever support and so I committed myself to the long term, ultimate mission of getting ‘thinking’ on the school curriculum.
For 30 years I’ve used my wits, time and energy and financial resources to promote this cause. I believe Edward de Bono’s work is still eminent in the field although my experience that some of his techniques, like the full CoRT Thinking syllabus, are far too complicated for general distribution.
SOT pioneered a much simpler and more brainuser-friendly concept for teaching thinking called “School of Thinking Caps” in 1983. Edward was attracted to the idea and published an almost identical version of the idea in 1985 as Six Thinking Hats and through 20 years of hard work has now successfully spread the ‘thinking caps/hats” concept around the world. It is used widely in business and in schools. Characteristically, Edward fails in his book to attribute the unique contribution made by SOT. Unfortunately this has led to an ongoing dispute between SOT and Edward de Bono.
I think Edward’s greatest contribution is that written up in his book The Mechanism of Mind (1967) although he became most popularly known for his invention of the term lateral thinking which is now in the Oxford Dictionary.
When Dr de Bono, was Professor of Investigative Medicine at Cambridge in England he was an expert in body systems. In The Mechanism of Mind which he wrote 35 years ago, Edward de Bono builds a model of how the brain, as an organ of the body, is very likely to operate as mind. This model shows how the brain system, by operating along the lines of other body systems like the liver system or lung system can produce a mind, a biological system to process information. By showing how the brain operates as a self-organising, patterning system de Bono saw the need to promote lateral thinking as a compensation mechanism for some of the limitations of the brain/mind patterning system.
••• It’s worth a visit to the Edward de Bono Society – the home of lateral thinking. There are many useful resources there … and it’s pro bono!
March 14th, 2009 at 5:10 am
Interesting Great Thinker.